


Childhood Waning

by SweetPollyOliver



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Next Generation (Movies)
Genre: Childhood Friends, F/M, Growing Up, Klingon Adolescence, Pen Pals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-05-07 05:11:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19202557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetPollyOliver/pseuds/SweetPollyOliver
Summary: They were together, then apart, then together. Clara and Alexander through the years.





	Childhood Waning

The first time it occurred to Alexander that he was drifting out of step with his human peers, he had more pressing things on his mind. 

Huddled beneath a fallen metal girder he held Clara Sutter’s hand and told her a story as they waited for someone to come and rescue them from the wreckage of the Enterprise.

“What if no one comes for us,” Clara cut across him, voice quavering. He squeezed her hand. 

“Don’t worry,” he said. “My father won’t stop looking until he finds us.” 

She wordlessly tucked herself closer to his side and he became aware suddenly that he felt responsible for her. Counting the human way, Clara was six years older than him. But that had never mattered before, because they were, as Counselor Troi had once said in his hearing, “at approximately similar developmental stages.” He wondered if that was becoming more approximate. 

The ship creaked ominously around them and all thoughts of what developmental milestones he’d been hitting lately went out of his head. 

*

“I’m going to stay with my grandparents for a while and my father is going to visit the monastery on Boreth. But soon he’ll send for me and then we can live together on Qo’NoS,” he said and she tried so hard to feel happy for him. 

“Can I write to you?” she asked. “I’ve never been good enough friends with someone before to stay in touch.” 

“Of course,” he said. “And we’ll see each other again, I promise.”

She remembered her own promise to Isabella, her first best friend, and nodded solemnly. They would see each other again.

*

Three months after Worf had accepted a reassignment to DS9, Alexander grew fifteen and a half centimetres all in a painful two weeks. He didn’t know where his limbs ended anymore and he bumped into every end table and counter top in his grandparents’ house until he was covered in tender bruises. 

All this might have taken his mind off the stinging hurt he nursed over his father leaving him behind, but the attendant mood swings made it hard to ignore. 

He read over Clara’s last message. 

She was saying all the things his grandparents were saying. That his father had almost lost him when the Enterprise had crashed, that he was going to work in an active warzone, that he sent him away because he loved him. 

He knew it was because he was a disappointment. If his father believed that he was Klingon enough, then he wouldn’t be afraid for him to die: only for him to die dishonourably. He appraised his own short life with an unflinching eye and realised how lacking it must seem to his father. Sitting awkwardly in this chair that had fit him two weeks ago, with a gorche on his chin and another near his hairline, Alexander felt that he fell pretty short of any kind of ideal. 

He was too angry to reply to Clara. He would just say things to her that she didn’t deserve because he was upset. He let the padd drop to the floor from his dangling fingers and let out a low groan. 

*

Another week went by with no reply from Alexander and the most recent reply she had gotten was short and carefully dispassionate, like he was writing to a stranger. 

One of the few things he had said was that he had grown again. 

Whenever they had leave on Earth, Clara’s aunts would exclaim and cluck over her height and talk about things she couldn’t remember from when she was little. It made her feel awkward. They knew more about her as a baby than they did about what she was like now and she didn’t know how to act around them. 

Klingons grew up faster than humans--when she’d met Alexander he’d seemed like he was her age, but he was only two. She had never really thought about it before, but she’d assumed that the gap between them would keep them growing up at the same pace. But now… well. She was being left behind. Soon all she’d have would be stories about when Alexander was little that would embarrass him. 

*

The engineer of the Ya’Vang had taken a shine to Alexander, much to his horror. 

“You’re too smart to waste as a bekk,” she’d said, in willful defiance of all evidence to the contrary, while thrusting a padd full of calculus problems into his hands. “Come back when you’ve finished these.” 

So here he was. Scratching away at integration by parts like a Federation brat (he tried not to remember that he was, in fact, more a Federation brat than not) in a cafe. He’d heard they were the only place on the space station they were docked at that served half decent raktajino.  
“Alexander!” 

He looked up, surprised, but it was just the barista calling to her colleague. 

“Wait… Alexander?” 

The girl at the table across from him got up from her chair and walked over to him. With a start he realised who it was. 

“Clara,” he replied. 

“You’re so tall,” she said and then blushed. “I’m sorry, that’s a stupid thing to say.”

“No, don’t worry about it. You too.”

She sat down at his table, drawing the eyes of several civilians. He still wasn’t used to being seen as a threatening Klingon man as opposed to an inconvenient Klingon boy. 

“What are you doing here?” she asked him. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d be on the station?”

It slowly dawned on him that this was the station where Clara and her father had relocated after the Enterprise crashed. He knew the name sounded familiar when his commanding officer had announced the shore leave, but he couldn’t place it. He felt like a petaQ. 

“Wait, why are you wearing that uniform?” she said, before he had time to think of a polite way to say that he’d forgotten where she lived. 

“I’m in the Klingon Defense Force” he said. 

“But you’re only eight!” she said, loud enough to carry. 

It was his turn to blush as more people turned to look at them. 

“I’m… older than that. In the Klingon calendar,” he said, cheeks burning. 

“How old am I in the Klingon calendar?” 

“Old enough to cause trouble, too young to answer for it,” he said. 

“That’s not a number,” she replied pertly.

“It’s a Klingon saying. It means that you’re still a child.”

She looked up at him with reproach. 

“That’s not a bad thing,” he said hastily. “Childhood is precious.”

“You’re a pompous ass.” 

“I’m trying my best; I’m only eight,” he said. 

After a long pause she smiled. She still had dimples in her cheeks. She looked down at his padd and pulled it towards her; he let it go easily from his hands.

“Trig substitution would be easier for this one,” she said. 

“I hate calculus,” he groaned and dropped his head to the table top. 

“I’ll help you with it.” 

*

He did a better job of staying in touch this time. 

War turned to peace and the years slipped by like water cupped in his hands before he’d noticed. Klingon childhood was short compared with that of humans, but Klingon adolescence was long. 

He wasn’t sure quite when Clara had overtaken him again, but it became unavoidably obvious the longer their correspondence continued. 

He was slowly climbing the ranks in engineering, but his hair still grew like an oddly luxuriant weed, he erupted with a new gorche at least once a week and he still had to talk himself down from starting a fight if he missed lunch, meanwhile Clara… well. She was a grown up now. And he was still young enough to call people grown ups. 

She was a TA at Starfleet Academy and her arch comments about the undergraduates she taught made him feel desperately childish. He felt sure that she would think he was a stupid kid if they met again.

“ _If I have to respond to a single message more with ‘read the syllabus’ I’m going to scream._ ” He stopped reading and cringed under the blankets, where he was reading her most recent letter, remembering a message he’d received from his superior officer the previous week: _Son of Worf, read the damn manual for the PX-387 and stop asking me questions you can answer yourself._

“Stop reading letters from your girlfriend and turn the light off, petaQ!” his roommate shouted from the top bunk. 

“She’s not my girlfriend,” he muttered, before giving the command to switch off the lights. 

*

She wasn’t sure when Alexander’s letters changed, but the longer they wrote to one another the more stark the difference became. 

It wasn’t the first time. When they’d gone their separate ways first, he had written her stilted, careful letters that were short but full of details that could have filled much longer letters (“My father has left me on Earth again. I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. We had eggs for lunch today” would probably ring in her mind for the rest of life.) 

When they met again, he’d written her longer, rambling letters about his day to day life, his shipmates, his mentor in Engineering. The lack of fruit featured once and she had sent him a box of dehydrated mangos, which apparently left his shipmates under the impression that he had a Federation sweetheart. 

Over time though, his letters had gotten more careful again. Not stilted this time, but she got the impression that she was no longer receiving an unedited first draft; for one, his sentences were all grammatically perfect and didn’t sound much like him. For another, he’d stopped telling her any funny stories that made him look silly, which used to be the bread and butter of his correspondence. 

One blip in this new trend had been when he sent her a poem he’d written. It was in Klingon, and while the Universal Translator was many things it was no replacement for a person when it came to translating literature, so she couldn’t really get a sense of it beyond the literal meaning of the words. On that surface a reading, it was about working with clay as a child. She wrote back to say that she’d liked it, but her Klingon wasn’t good enough to appreciate it the way the right audience would. He didn’t send her any more poems after that. 

*

It was strange how things changed. When he had started serving, growing up with humans had made him questionably able at best, but now it was being considered to be an advantage. 

“The Starfleet lieutenant will be beaming over at 05.00 hours,” his captain had said gruffly. “Make sure the crew don’t throw her to the targs.” 

The Officer Exchange Program was not the untried or uncertain enterprise that it had been when his Uncle Will had served briefly on the _Pagh_ , but it still generally took non-Klingons a while to settle in. 

Personally, Alexander thought it was a little patronising for the incoming officer that he was being deputised to mind her: previous Starfleet officers had managed for themselves. But far be it from him to protest being taken off the night shift for easy work. 

Glittering ahead of him, the silhouette of a person appeared on the transporter pad. 

When the figure appeared fully, blinking slightly at the comparatively lower light of a Klingon vessel, it was-

“Clara!” he exclaimed. “I mean…. Lieutenant Sutter.” 

The bekk at his side glanced at him sideways, just quick enough to avoid the accusation of insubordination. It was common gossip that the son of Worf looked upon none of the women on board because his heart was in the keeping of a Federation woman. He didn’t pay it any mind, because it did a ship good to have some gossip, unless someone suggested that he was too fragile and human to be any good to a Klingon woman. Then he’d knock a few heads together and called it a day. 

“Lieutenant Rozhenko,” she answered. 

“Lieutenant Alexander, actually,” he replied, unable to stop smiling. The young warrior at his side was trying and failing to look professionally disinterested in their conversation. She would have plenty to tell her peers in the mess hall later. 

“My apologies for the ethnocentrism, lieutenant,” Clara responded with a far better attempt at professionalism. 

Alexander laughed. 

“You’re on a Klingon ship now,” he said. “If I was offended, you’d know all about it.” 

She cracked a smile and walked down from the transporter pad to join him. 

*

They walked down the halls of the ship together and he pointed out key areas as they passed them. 

“You’ll be provided with a map, so don’t worry if you can’t remember this,” he said.

“I’ve got it,” she replied full of Federation pep. 

Finally he left her to her quarters — as a relatively senior officer, she didn’t have to share and had her own, albeit pocket sized, space. 

“It’s strange being on the same ship again,” he said. “But good strange.”

“It’s been twenty years,” she replied. “Counting my way.” 

“Pretty long either way,” Alexander agreed. “You’ll be working with me in engineering anyway, so you’ll have plenty of time to get sick of me again.” 

“I never got sick of you the first time, Alexander,” she said and then glanced at the junior officer standing next to her friend. “I’ll see you in engineering.” 

The doors slid shut after her and she went to lie down on her purgatorially hard bed. 

The next day, she was aware of several sets of eyes following her everywhere she went. There were no whispers — Klingons weren’t the whispering sort. 

They were, however, not shy about voicing their opinions as she became aware in the mess hall. 

“You’ve broken more hearts than you know,” a grey haired Klingon woman said, slapping her tray down in front of Clara’s. 

“Oh?” she replied carefully.

“Who’d have thought that Alexander’s Starfleet charge would turn out to be his Federation girl,” the woman chuckled. 

“Alexander and I were children together,” she said. “We’ve kept in touch. I’m not anyone’s girl and no one needs to take charge of me.” 

“We’ll see,” the woman replied again and chuckled some more into her gagh. 

*

Overnight, the rumours had mutated once more. Now, not only was Clara his long lost love, but they had been childhood sweethearts. He felt uneasy. It was one thing weathering these frenzies of gossip himself, but he didn’t want Clara to feel uncomfortable. 

She took a station on the opposite side of engineering to him, which hurt him and relieved him in equal measure. 

Over the next few days, he watched her out of the corner of his eye. She was struggling. It didn’t take a genius to see. The crew were not outwardly hostile, but they didn’t embrace her with open arms either.

It all came bubbling to a head one day shortly after the Gamma shift came back from shore leave, weaving on uncertain feet and leaning on each other heavily.

One crewmember, worse for wear than even her compatriots, saw Clara and narrowed her eyes, spitting on the ground. 

Clara turned to face her fully. 

“You have something to say to me?” she asked, arms crossed. 

The crewmember growled under her breath and waved her off. “I have nothing to say. Lieutenant,” she hissed. 

“I saw you spit at the sight of me — do you expect me not to answer to this disrespect?” Clara was standing to her full height, bristling with anger. 

“I expect you to report me for insolence, little Federation mouse,” the crewmember said. “That’s what you’d do in Starfleet isn’t it?”

“We’re not in Starfleet,” Clara said and Alexander felt a rising panic enter his stomach. “So I demand you fight me in honourable combat or be known as a coward.”

It didn’t go well, although, Alexander supposed that it could have gone worse. The drunkenness of her opponent had helped, but there was just no getting away from the denser bones and greater height and muscle mass of a Klingon compared with a human. She cracked three ribs and broke her nose before the captain came and broke up the fight. 

He came by her quarters with a purloined medical tricorder and a lot of things to say later that evening. 

“Oh don’t start,” she said when the doors opened. She turned back into the room and he followed her in. 

“What were you thinking?” he asked.

“She spat on the ground!” she replied sitting down heavily on the bed and wincing at her sore ribs. “I can’t let that fly and expect people to respect me.” 

“Well at least let me heal your injuries,” he said, holding up the tricorder.

“No way,” she replied. “I decided to fight, so I’ll keep the injuries.”

“That’s stupid,” he said. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s superficial,” she said. “I don’t want to look like I can’t stand to be hurt.” 

He sighed and sat down next to her.

“Thanks for not breaking it up,” she said, more quietly.

“If I broke it up it would look like you needed your boyfriend to save you,” he said absently. There was a long silence. “N-not that I’m your boyfriend. It’s just the stupid gossip mill.”

“Hey Alexander?” she said, turning to face him.

“Yeah,” he replied, looking into her bruised and bloody face. She was beautiful.

“Shut up,” she said and pulled him towards her in a kiss. 

As their lips met he found himself thinking: she didn’t need him to be responsible for her, she was doing just fine on her own.

**Author's Note:**

> It is my intention that Alexander and Clara are Just Friends with no thought of anything else for most of this story, because they spend a lot of it out of step with each other developmentally, until the end when they circle back around to being roughly equivalent ages. In the last few scenes, Alexander is 24 and Clara is 30. For reference, Worf is 24 in season one of TNG.


End file.
